Creators of Ruya

Tranzfuser Week #1

This week has been very much design driven. Key areas being Art style, level system, intrinsic rewards and new game modes, and how this will all come together.

We’ve also re-worked our milestones putting some things such as character and mixy shape designs into the back log while we focus more deeply on to the UI design and readability for our target audience.

Our core objective within this competition is to increase player retention and strategizing how we can monetize the game. Before the competition, the player’s progression was based around passing rounds/waves of new objectives. Objectives such as:

Swiping shapes until reaching the target number of shapes.

Swiping shapes to reach the number of points required.

Swiping any type of shape.

The problem we face is shown to us through the analytics. From 100 play testers people start to give up at Round 15. The player finds less motivation to carry on and the rounds begin to get increasingly more difficult only in terms of quantity of shapes to swipe.

The player needs to know how well they have done and where they are going. A Level system is how we plan to do this and to give the player a sense of progression and each level being graded a star. This is what I have been working on this week along with Patryk. We are changing the core round system so that it works based on levels. Levels are placed on a vertical map which you scroll up as you progress through them. We have also cut the number of game types because 3 wasn’t clearly understood and created a lot of clutter in the UI. Instead we are having just one, swiping shapes until you have hit the number points required and this will help with readability.

Within the Level map there will be characters that play as a sort of visual narrative similar to TwoDots. This is what Bradley has been working on, first sketching out some ideas and then progressing through into Photoshop. He has also been working on the UI layout for the upcoming game modes and defining the color pallet.

In the coming week once the level system has been implemented we will be moving on to the two new game modes:

Bubbles and,

Balloons

Once the player has been introduced to the core mechanics. The player will be given another objective. Along with swiping shapes, they will need to swipe the shapes in specific cells to pop bubbles. All of the bubbles must be popped for the level to be complete. Balloons will need to rise among the cells until it can float away meaning the player needs to swipe a shape above the balloon to keep it floating. All these objectives will be dependent on a swipe count and great balancing will be needed to pull these mechanics and grid sizes together to keep the player in the game flow.

Enrico has been refining the gameplay music and theme along with creating varied versions for the different game modes to create a different feel of gameplay similar to Candy Crush Saga.

We have made good progress. And once the level system is complete. Work can start on the new challenging game modes.